In our What’s for Dinner segment, Joy gives you the straight truth in her review of Trader Joe’s cauliflower gnocchi.

Marisa walks us through her favorite big-batch breakfast casseroles.

We relive all the fun and excitement of our final Joy of Cooking potluck series, which was filmed for TV! (Want to join us next time? Leave a comment to be added to the invite list. This is a separate list from our regular newsletter list, FYI.)

We’re doing a little housekeeping with a round of updates about this very podcast. We’re taking a summer vacation …. Kind of. The show will be on an every-other-week schedule till after labor day

That’s because behind the scenes we’re working on something pretty special–more food content from our hearts to your ears. We have ambitious, friends. If you are listening it’s probably because you like this show. We really appreciate your listening and subscribing to the podcast. But if you want to help our project grow there are a couple of things we’d like to ask you to do:

Tell a friend. Word of mouth is the way podcast audiences grow. Do you know another home cooking fan who you think would like Local Mouthful? Tell them about the show, in person, in an email or text, or on social media. A lot people tell us they pick up tips they use in their kitchens–tell a friend what you learned. If they don’t know how to subscribe to podcasts, show them.

Leave us a review on iTunes (or wherever you get the podcast from). Not only do these reviews help other listeners find us, we read them and that makes us feel good.

We talked over good party menus to feed a crowd and our favorite entertaining themes and recipes.

We are both pretty excited about making shrubs, which are delicious drinking vinegars made from fruit, sugar and (of course) plenty of tart vinegar. Marisa has been making them for years and Joy has just gotten started. They are easy!

And speaking of all things hippie–Marisa has recently gotten back into the groove of sprouting lentils at home.

Our last episode of the year is one more big ol’ special episode before the year comes to an end. We made our lists and checked them twice–our “Everything I Cooked for Dinner in 2016” lists, that is–and then compared notes. We talk about the stuff we made again and again, the places we looked for recipes, and what we were making when weren’t using recipes.